First and Second
by Crookshanks22
Summary: Preeti Patil spills the beans about raising twins, being a second wife, and living as an immigrant witch in Muggle Birmingham.


". . . the Patil twins were gone before breakfast . . ."

-J.K. Rowling, _Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince_, chapter 30

What happened before breakfast?

**First and Second**

Delhi, Madras, Mumbai, Mysore. Patil's Wizarding Warehouse is open for business. Time-turners and tents and teacups, Gobstones and Golden Eggs. Get them now, get them here. Cloaks and clocks and crystal balls, Put-outers and Pensieves. Coming soon to Goa, coming soon to Bangalore. There are six Patil brothers and Jaya in the current generation; in the rising generation, a whole swarm of cousins, middle-aged, adolescent, and infant, turbaned and saried, a small army of canny merchandising Patils.

Half a world away, in the office above the shop, decorative and aloof in her Muggle Italian suit, 24-karat jewelry, and three-inch heels, Preeti Patil sips her chai and slowly turns the pages of yesterday's _Daily Prophet_. She looks out the open window, into the crystalline brilliance of the June sunshine, into the sharp-edged gritty dignity of the not-yet-open-for-business Birmingham street, and she awaits the daily owl.

There's a rustle in the fireplace and she points her wand at it, silently lifting the screen that shields it from the Muggle customers' gaze. (There are two sections of the Patils' shop, one for wizards, one for wizards and Muggles. Marketing safe goods to Muggles, not just to the modestly affluent wizarding community, has been the secret of the Patils' commercial success.) Sandeep Ghoti's head pops up in the fire. Sandeep is a young man, not much over twenty, educated at the Wizarding Institute of Cochin and now apprenticed to his uncle, a wandmaker who has just secured premises in Diagon Alley and is trying to seize the remnants of Ollivander's custom. Preeti doesn't know the Ghotis well, but Sandeep is personable, good-looking and pureblooded, and wandmaking is a specialized and lucrative business. So she greets him warmly, with an eye to the future.

He asks after Raj, who has apparated to Amsterdam for a few days, to help his daughter Lalita and her husband set up the second European outpost of Patil's Wizarding Warehouse. She asks after the wand business, and Sandeep reports that it's picking up. Eleven-year-olds are trickling in to buy their school wands for the autumn. Everyone misses Ollivander, but they've made some sales. His aunt has finished unpacking, and his cousin's arriving next week, and England—well, England is interesting. England is very, very interesting, and it's a very long way from Cochin, but he likes the pubs and he likes the Quidditch, and in any case, he's here to stay.

"And your cousin?" asks Preeti. "Will he be joining you in the wand shop?"

"No, no," says Sandeep, "Vikram is a Healer. Just finished training in Creature Wounds. That's why Uncle Girish took me on, really—no son to follow him, as they both went into Healing."

"Ah," says Preeti. "Ah. Good day, Sandeep. Say hello to your Aunt Ruchi."

She thinks the cousin sounds like a better prospect than Sandeep himself. She likes Sandeep, he's a nice boy, but a little happy-go-lucky. She thinks the girls can do better. Padma can certainly do better.

There's no one for them at school. No nice Indian boys, right religion, right caste, right family. Oh, she knows they went to the Yule Ball with English boys, and she saw Anthony Goldstein's owls of chocolates and Chocolate Frog cards all last summer. She's not worried about a suitor who doesn't know Padma well enough to know that Padma doesn't like chocolate. She's not worried about their dancing with English boys, as long as they know it's just dancing and not marrying.

They live in England, after all. Her daughters live in England; they attend a Scottish school. It's not like Cochin, where there's a Patil in every class.

No, it's really not like Cochin.

She thinks she'll have to write to Jaya. She'll have to hire a really strong owl, one that can fly to Delhi, and she'll have write to Jaya, and she isn't looking forward to it, because she has never liked her sister-in-law much, and her sister-in-law has never much liked her. But the time has come. They're seventeen, they're at the peak of their beauty, they've only got one year left at school, and it's not like she wants grandchildren now, heaven knows she can wait a few years for that, in any case Sumitra and Lalita already have children, but there can be no foot-dragging if she wants her daughters to marry well. And now that Reena is finally married, now that Raj's last daughter by his first wife is finally, finally married, it's time to get on to her own. It's no joke, it's really no sinecure, marrying off five daughters.

At least they're beautiful.

As she was beautiful.

She was twenty-two when she married him, and now she is forty-one, and men still stop and stare. Muggles, too, even though Preeti is never sure she's got the Muggle chic quite right. It must have been two summers ago when she first noticed the men staring at Padma and Parvati. You would think she would mind, men stopping to stare at her teenaged daughters, Muggles too, but she didn't. Not one bit. Because brains are all very well—and both of the girls have brains (Padma a little too much)—but if she hadn't been beautiful, she would still be just some girl from a village, barefoot and undowered.

Raj's second marriage may have been unpopular with his sister Jaya, but it was still less popular with his sisters-in-law. There were five of them, ranging from twelve to twenty years her senior: Asha, Neelam, Kriti, Sarmistha, and Bimala. At the engagement party, they looked her up and down and rolled their eyes, communicating bluntly, wordlessly, that she was no fit successor to Priya. Oh, Preeti was a pureblood, sure enough, but aside from her blood status she was nobody, just some girl from a village, and what would some twenty-two-year-old from a village know about bringing up daughters? About marrying off Patils?

They were right, of course. It was true. Everything her sisters-in-law thought, and said, and didn't say was true. Preeti's father is simple Sonal, the water carrier, barely literate and not very magic either. Her elder brother drives the Knight Bus in Cochin. The younger one's a Squib. Her sisters married working men . . . well, they did the best they could. Everything that Asha said was true. Everything Bimala said was true.

Priya's father was vice-warlock of the Wizengamot, the merchant prince of Madras. Priya was kindly and gentle and loving and good, gracious and clever and an heiress to boot. Everyone loved Priya, but Priya is gone. And a man who marries a second time marries to please himself.

He fell in love, that was all. He went to the village, an inconsolable widower of nigh on forty. He went to the village on business for the firm, and he saw a young witch conjuring water from an almost arid well and there, for no good reason, he fell in love.

And she? She liked him, of course. She liked the idea of getting married. She wanted to get away from the baking heat and the bride burnings, the Muggle-baiting and the disastrous monsoons. She wanted to get away from the village, with its arid well. He seemed nice. He wanted her. And beauty was the only capital she ever had.

So they were married out of hand, quickly, recklessly, against the better judgment of the Patils and most of wizarding Madras, and Preeti got a better husband than she perhaps deserved. She has tried to deserve him, all these years. She has tried to deserve her daughters. They go back to Madras, every second summer, and the girls run wild amid the tangle of relations. They have twenty-seven cousins on Raj's side alone. Their crisp fluent English, their English education, their beauty, and the novelty of twinhood secure their place in the ever-expanding circle of turbaned and saried Patils. Even now, on the cusp of adulthood, they remain only vaguely aware that their young mother, with her movie star good looks, was deemed an unworthy successor to Priya Thapar, and a very poor match indeed for Raj Patil.

Preeti puts down her chai and stares out the window. The owl is late. The owl is never late.

Preeti sighs and thinks, fondly, dotingly, of her daughters, who would be waking up now, if they were home. She would be folding the newspaper now, if the newspaper had been delivered on time, and she would be Flooing her kitchen, where Parvati would be eating cherry yogurt straight from the container and flipping distractedly through Muggle fashion catalogs. Padma would tumble down the stairs in her pajamas, eyes matted with sleep, hair streaming, gorgeous even in her early morning dishabille, and shove Parvati out of the way as she jabbed her wand at the coffeemaker, and Parvati would cry grumpily, "Don't do that! You got yogurt on the Top Shop catalog!" And the snit would continue, as her two beautiful seventeen-year-old daughters sniped at each other in the perfect, elegant, God-damn-you Oxbridge English they had learned from the tutor they once shared with Pansy Parkinson.

Preeti is proud of her daughters, proud beyond measure. She sees them, she hears them, even in her solitary early morning fantasies, and she is so, so proud. They are the measure of what she and Raj have achieved in the splendid isolation of Muggle Birmingham. The girls were infants, two months old when they came to Birmingham, and they spoke English before they spoke Hindi. Sumitra and Lalita were at boarding school then, and they left them behind in Madras. Reena came with them to Birmingham, got her letter, and started in the autumn at Hogwarts. It was a rough six months before she went. Preeti told herself it would be better when Reena went to school, but it wasn't, it was worse. She didn't learn a thing, she just spent all her time shut up in the Ravenclaw dormitory, crying her eyes out. In the end there was nothing for it, so they sent her home to her sisters, to be raised by cousins in Madras, half a world away, well beyond the capacity of your average owl.

It occurs to Preeti sometimes that Raj has given up rather a lot to be here, in Birmingham. But then she goes to the Indo-British Wizarding Association, the tiny club that meets one Friday evening a month above a shop in Diagon Alley, and she looks around the room and thinks, so has she, and so has he, and so has she. So have we all.

She the least of all of them, because here she is the smart, good-looking, well-dressed, well-to-do wife of Raj Patil, with a four-bedroom house in Birmingham and two gorgeous daughters, one of whom is a Ravenclaw prefect, and at home she'd be just some girl from a village, perpetually a stranger in her husband's home.

Preeti is glad to be in England, despite the war. She is glad to send her daughters to Hogwarts, despite the rumors. She has heard the rumors, of course. There were rumors all last spring, buzzing around the Parents' Association, Diagon Alley, the Ministry, about some illegal club (Rufus Scrimgeour called it a "paramilitary group") that had been formed to fight Voldemort, or Dolores Umbridge, or possibly just Argus Filch, no one was quite sure. And a lot of the fifth-year parents were worried, but Preeti was not, because her daughters have their heads screwed on straight, and she is sure they would never engage is such a risky activity. She is absolutely sure.

Well, almost sure.

Well, the truth is, it's hard to be sure. She is the one who lies awake nights, wondering, worrying, wishing her daughters weren't at Hogwarts. She is the one who lies awake nights, planning their matches, planning their weddings, planning her triumphant return to Madras. She is the one who lies awake, whilst Raj sleeps like a log. Through the opening of the Chamber of Secrets, through the Triwizard Tournament and that poor boy's death, through Dumbledore's disappearance and the Battle at the Ministry and the opening of the second war, Raj has slept long and soundly. Raj never turns a hair.

He had nothing more to fear, after Priya died.

And that's why they're in Birmingham.

Old Man Patil, Raj's grandfather who founded the Wizarding Warehouse, long dreamed of expanding overseas. And Young Man Patil, Raj's father who built the Warehouse from one storefront in Delhi into a national chain, long intended to carry out his father's dream. But though he had six sons and one son-in-law, Young Man Patil could never quite persuade any of them to move to England. It wasn't that they didn't admire English culture; it wasn't that they didn't crave English wealth. It wasn't that they wouldn't all have jumped at the chance to send their children to Hogwarts, for though the Wizarding Institute of Cochin is a very good school, its headmaster is not quite so famous as Albus Dumbledore, and everyone knows that a British education opens doors. No, it wasn't England per se, but the war, the first war, as people call it now, but then it was the only war, the war that dragged on and on. That war was a world war, but it was centered in England, and everyone well knew that Voldemort was an English boy, a violent, arrogant, and—alas!—Hogwarts-educated English boy. Everyone well knew, back in Madras, back in Cochin, that no nice Indian boy would torture and kill and invade the Muggle world for the sake of a petty immortality, when he should be striving for nirvana.

It wasn't worth the risk, just to sell a few Put-Outers in Birmingham.

Then Priya died.

Preeti looks out the window. The owl is late today. The owl is very late.

Muggles. They were torturing Muggles. Children, untouchables. The leatherworkers' brats from the slums of Madras. There were three of them, tall men and fair, Aryan, high-caste, pointing their wands through the pockets of their cloaks and making the children trip and stumble, collide with each other, tread on hot coals. "It reminded me so much of the Grindelwald War," whispered Sarmistha—Sarmistha being the least unsympathetic of Preeti's five sisters-in-law—"provoking them, you know, like Grindelwald—making them turn on each other—making them fight—"

It may have been the only time in her entire life that Priya lost her temper. She rushed into the melee, brandishing her wand—or so the Wizengamot later ruled; it's impossible to know, of course, because the Muggles' accounts (even before their memories were modified) were too disjointed and incoherent to be of much use to anyone, and no other witches or wizards were present except for the three Death Eaters, who swiftly bound Priya with a freezing Charm and disapparated. They're still at large. Priya was burnt to death in the open square, like a Muggle "witch" burnt at the stake. And four of her sisters-in-law can hardly bring themselves to speak her name, torn between the unspeakable tragedy of losing their merchant princess and the inchoate shame of being thus embroiled in the disreputable English boy's war that they had thought so far away.

And then to think that Raj could remarry—and so disgracefully, too. So soon. They agreed, the five of them (even Sarmistha) that they could never feel quite the same way about him again. For owls fly thick and fast in India, and what Asha thinks in Delhi, Bimala broadcasts in Mysore.

Raj's daughters weren't happy, either. The younger ones hated their mother for being murdered, for letting herself be murdered, but they hated Preeti still more for usurping her role. Sumitra was the only one of Raj's daughters who warmed to her, even though she was fourteen when he remarried, almost grown-up really, well maybe that was why she found the grace of kindness, the grace that Lalita and Reena never found.

Raj saw her unhappiness. He decided, in his reckless good-nature, to rescue her. He announced they were moving to Birmingham as soon as the baby was born (the long-awaited boy, the fortuneteller said; they didn't yet know it was twins). There they would fulfill his father's ambition by opening the first European branch of Patil's.

Raj's brothers were a little concerned. His sisters-in-law were not. What a convenient solution, they said. What a convenient place to warehouse their embarrassingly poor village sister-in-law, their war widower of a brother-in-law . . . Let them be happy and far away.

Was that it, Preeti wonders now. Was Raj running away? She didn't know him as a young man, of course, but Jaya said, and the other women agreed, that he wasn't the same man anymore, after Priya died.

Sore, tired, eight months pregnant, Preeti labored over the trunks and boxes, the detritus of thirteen years of marriage and three children not her own. She knew from the moment she opened the first one, and inhaled the sweet musty perfume of a buried past, that Raj had not looked at them, not one of them, since the day that Priya died.

She labored over the trunks and boxes, footsore and eight months pregnant, as Neelam's teenagers ranged over the house they shared, her stepdaughters whined and cried, and Kriti's disembodied head murmured fretfully in the fireplace. It had never occurred to her, as a barefoot girl from a village, that the second-best home in Madras could feel so small. She thought wonderingly, I've wanted to live her all my life and now I never will again. She got cold feet, the winter before they moved to Birmingham. She was homesick before she left. But Raj had rescued her from the village, and in her gratitude she let him rescue her, not too reluctantly, from the gossipy hothouse of the second-best home in Madras.

In the musty storeroom, she bid an ambivalent goodbye to Priya's ghost, who, she assumed, would be staying in Madras.

Silly she.

Padma and Parvati may grow up, may leave school, may marry and move away, as Sumitra did, as Lalita did, as Reena has done at last, but Priya's ghost will abide with her to the end of time. Polygamy, of a sort. They've worked out a power-sharing agreement, the living woman and the ghost. Priya's prestige in the household depends on being perfect. Preeti's depends on being here.

She doesn't hate Priya. Sometimes, often, she loves her. Loves the calm good nature that molded Raj into a model husband. Loves the solid tasteful lasting quality of the belongings she inherited. Loves the wholesome sweetness that shines so brightly in Sumitra, if not in the other two.

In moments of stress, bereft of her own family whom she left in the village, alienated from Raj's watchful critical sisters-in-law, she likes to imagine that Priya's ghost is with her, that Priya's ghost is guiding her, that Priya has come to love the second wife as she has come to love the first.

But it isn't so. There is no ghost, because only cowards become ghosts, and Priya was no coward.

The owl is late. No, the owl is here. She looks through the open window into the piercing crystalline light of an early summer morning, and she sees a large brown owl flying unsteadily towards her. It is weeping. Glistening tears drop heavily from its unlashed eyes. Preeti seizes the paper bound to its ankle and tears off the wrapper to read the stop-press notice of Albus Dumbledore's murder. And she thinks, with cold blinking wonder, the words she never thought to hear inside her head.

Maybe we should have stayed in Madras.

Priya. Priya? Tell me from the other side, tell me what to do. Let them stay or call them home? Call them home or let them stay? Stay awake the rest of my life, waiting for owls?

Maybe we should have stayed in Madras.


End file.
